His face was flushed, and his brown hair was rumpled, half-flattened. She almost made it to the stage before Stuart Kline grabbed her arm. I'm going to go up and scare the cockroaches out of the bass drum.' 'Sometimes I take my blessings for granted. 'You mean I haven't been sleeping with Stuart?' 'It's steady work.' Carla was silent for a moment, then added, 'Well, it used to be.' So why don't you quit?'Įddi looked at her, then at her glass, then at the ceiling.

'I think I'm gonna hear the 'This Band Sucks Dead Rat' speech again.' 'Ideally, before he booked the job.'Ĭarla sighed. 'It would have been smarter to tell Stuart it was a bad idea,' Eddi said. With her shaggy black hair and her eyes made up dark for the stage, she looked exotic as a tiger, wholly out of place in the University Bar. 'Every time you've said that this evening, it's sounded smarter.' Carla DiAmato was the drummer for InKline Plain. 'I think,' Eddi said, 'that this job was a bad idea.' And of course, Stuart, as bandleader, had accepted them all, played them wretchedly, forgot the words, and made it plain that he didn't care.

Too many country fans with requests for favorites. The first set had been bad enough, playing to a nearly empty club. She was glad the keyboard player had quit two weeks before-there wasn't room for him. She'd tried to wedge her guitar stand out of the way, but it still seemed likely to leap out and trip someone. The band's equipment threatened to overflow it. The promise of fifty dollars per band member kept them going it was more than they'd made last week.Įddi McCandry stared bleakly at the dim little stage with its red-and-black flocked wallpaper. But InKline Plain, the most misspelled band in Minneapolis, was there, playing the first night of a two-night gig with a sort of weary desperation.

It was small and smoky and smelled vaguely bad. The club boasted a jukebox stocked by the rental company and two old arcade games. They worked the assembly lines and warehouses, and wanted uncomplicated entertainment. The University Bar was not, in the grand scheme of the city, close to the university.

War for the oaks by emma bull